# Next clean data to remove the commmas and symbols and make them numeric values we can manipulate. Note these two lines can be collapsed, but broken out here to show for effect. Now if you use this ALOT it would be wise to make a function so you avoid copy and paste errors!

# Next clean data to remove the commmas and symbols and make them numeric values we can manipulate. Note these two lines can be collapsed, but broken out here to show for effect. Now if you use this ALOT it would be wise to make a function so you avoid copy and paste errors!

While different data sources come up with slightly different estimates, the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration Supplement shows that the level of early voting has tripled since 1998 in midterm elections, and has gone up two and half times in presidential years.

If the levels this year are 30% or higher, it will be the most in any midterm. It’s unlikely that this year’s early voting rate will hit the 2016 level of 39%, but it’s possible that we might approach it.

The governor’s race in Georgia involving the current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has highlighted a longstanding concern of many in the election law, election science, and election administration community–electing those public officials who oversee and administer elections. Rick Hasen captures the spirit of these concerns in his quote to Governing magazine:

It is a problem that we have partisan-elected secretaries of state as the chief election officers,” says Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine.

Of course, this issue is magnified by having the chief elections officer running for higher office, simultaneous with sometimes important–and politically fraught– decisions that have to be made about eligibility for the registration rolls, times and places for early voting, allocation of election machines and poll workers, even potentially decisions about recounts (this latter issue is what caused a controversy in the Republican primary for Kansas governor involving Secretary of State Kris Kobach).

We’ve been studying voter attitudes about the partisanship of election officials since 2008, and at least as far as the public is concerned, there’s really not much of an issue. Less than 1/5th of the public endorses the statement “election officials should be elected by the public, in a partisan contest.” About half the public thinks that the election officials should be elected in a partisan contest or appointed.

The percentages who endorse an appointive or non-partisan elective method doesn’t vary much by party. This is one of the few things that hasn’t been caught in the “voting wars” — a plurality of the public thinks that election officials should not themselves be elected.

In a new report that I co-authored with Natalie Adona of the Democracy Fund, we made a very similar point about trust and confidence in election officials. There, we showed that election officials enjoy a high level of public trust, nearly comparable to the Supreme Court (when we asked in 2008), and well above more “political” institutions like the executive branch and Congress.

We also warn, however, that (emphasis added):

Election administrators enjoy higher levels of public trust when compared to officials in other public institutions. State and local election officials should continue to enjoy high public approval if they are viewed as nonpartisan experts.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, and whether you support Brian Kemp or Stacey Abrams, you should be concerned when the integrity of the election system gets caught up in a polarized political environment.

Their study found that voting by mail, seemingly a solution to the transportation problems faced by residents on reservations, may not work as well as we might assume because of distrust of mail balloting.

This is a portion of the population that faces many significant barriers to voting. Tova Wang documented many of these barriers in a report issued by Demos nearly a decade ago, and things don’t seem to have improved.

Election geeks! I’m pleased to announce that Paul Manson, a PhD student and Senior Research Assistant at the Center for Public Service at Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, will be joining EVIC as research director.

Paul is a policy researcher who focuses on public involvement and participation technologies – systems used to collect, manage, and synthesize public perceptions and interests. His research on these technologies to understand how environmental debates are framed by the application of representational technologies. He has also research the role of public involvement in resilience and disaster recovery policy efforts in Oregon. Paul manages a series of election research projects with the Center for Public Service, with a focus on vote at home methods and voter registration efforts.

The Early Voting Information Center

We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.

The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.

Professor Gronke’s academic credentials–including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers–can be found at his personal Reed web page.